7 Responses to “Android scripting environment supports JRuby”

1

Hey! This is really exciting!

As I mentioned in my comment on my blog, I’m also interested in making it possible to build applications entirely in Ruby. That will take some work on compilation and optimization, along with a bit of ingenuity, but I know it’s possible. I’m hoping we can collaborate on that, so that Ruby becomes another first-class language for app development on Android. Feel free to drop me an email, or better yet, join the JRuby dev list and we can start a public discussion about it there.

How does this compare with this http://code.google.com/p/android-ruby/, (which is not using JRuby, but just Ruby)?
Is there any hope of doing and GUI programming with ASE? Is it possible with android-ruby? android-ruby seems like a project that has not gone anywhere? I just can’t find enough info. Someone in the comments at ASE was saying JRuby would be way too slow due to the was JAVA has no JIT compiller and therefore languages that are just cross compiled c, like ASE Python would fare much better.

I would love to write GUI apps for Android using Ruby.

Jason Buchheim (August 31st, 2009 at 16:14)

4

Hi Jason,
you are absolutely right, a cross-compiled CRuby is probably a lot faster. This was one approach I tried but I’m just not that much into cross-compiling and C so I coulnd’t get it to run. I haven’t tried android-ruby but adding support for yet another language is really easy (Damon did a damn good job!) and if I find the time I can add it to ASE. One thing ASE does that android-ruby doesn’t (I think, just quickly scanned the page) is the interface to Android-land. It’s very convenient to scan a barcode etc., and I guess if you want to write an Ruby application on Android, this is a must have…

I am very interested in using JRuby in Eclipse with the Android plugins. I personally don’t see much value in coding command line scripts directly on Android, given the limitations of the keyboard on my ADP2! Can anyone point me to the instructions for installling JRuby in Eclipse which will target Android?